Lists

More or less inspired by ylla.

Recent accomplishments
(not in chronological order)

• Sorted out the New Scotland money box. We have very many banknotes and coins of higher denominations and therefore are rich!
• Sent a New Scotland cheque to Stanley Mackay. We are now slightly less rich.
• Typed up the minutes from the New Scotland GM. Found out that TeX’ing tables goes easiest by making the table in Excel, copying to Word, then doing Convert table to text with “&” as column separator and then replace line breaks with “\\” plus line break; then copy result into .tex file.
• Formatted the crib sheet for the New Scotland Beginner’s Dance and sent it back to ylla for printing. It looks reasonably okay, but for some reason it didn’t seem possible to make it look as good as last year’s crib sheet.
• Updated the New Scotland constitution with changes from the GM. Yawn.
• Went to Teviot to book rooms for Inters Highland (in vain). They’re redeveloping the entire thing and sending all the dance societies to the Pleasance because they have more space there. No, the Pleasance only has two rooms that are suitable for dancing. That’s why all the dance societies are begging to please be allowed to use the concrete floors in Teviot.
• Read chapters in Schreier (2003) and Trudgill (2004). Their books are better than their article on Tristan da Cunha English phonology, which makes the article even worse. If you know what you’re doing (sort of), why don’t you make an effort in that article? Plus they still need to look at their data a bit better.
• Formatted my entry for the Philological Society’s essay contest according to PhilSoc rules. That would have been so much easier if PhilSoc just make a LaTeX style sheet.
• Became a member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. Or at least, filled in the form, copied my matric card as proof of my unwaged status, and included a cheque for £16.50 for membership including the Journal of Linguistics. The envelope is in the mail and I should be hearing from them at some point soon. (They give LAGB members a discount at Oxford University Press!)
• Wrote all the details from my cheque book on my bank statements. New Scotland and Dunedin are both excruciatingly slow in cashing cheques.
• Brought the Palaeography folder to the office. So that Oksana can pick it up at some point and learn all about Old and Middle English handwriting.
• Laundry. But not ironing.
• Chinese Food dem. Which had a very high number of Chinese people, many of the girls in high heels, but contrary to last year, was very low on actual Chinese food. We had to make GH lobby for us being fed. (Yay for a Mandarin speaker in New Scotland!) In the end we all got a pot of noodles. I hope they send James a big fat cheque.
• Marked EL1 assignments. Some know what they’re doing. Most have a reasonable idea, which is definitely enough to pass the exam. There’s a couple who are in real trouble. Actually going to lectures and tutorials may help there.

Still to accomplish

• Send off the PhilSoc essay. Which includes getting a letter from April saying that I am indeed doing a Ph.D., printing the thing off umpteen times and sending it to London somewhere.
• Read the rest of Schreier (2003) and Trudgill (2004). And come up with a reasonably flowing train of thoughts about what could be improved in the books and what they need to look at more. Or less.
• Read Guignet & Lottin (2006) in the NLS. Which probably involves re-applying for the book as it has been more than 6 days since I was there last. It is also a very boring book which doesn’t help.
• Remember what the other thing was I wanted to become a member of. I’m sure it was something languagey but can’t quite remember what. It may also have been Time which I thought about subscribing to a while back but have now decided it would be a waste of money.
• More dancing. Greek dancing, dem class, Halloween ceilidh, Thursday classes, possibly including inters country if it doesn’t rain.
• Sort out committee meeting. Involves pestering more committee members for when they can make the meeting and then try and figure out if there’s a date before the Beginners’ Dance that everyone can make. (That looks particularly unlikely at this point.)
• Call Mrs Wilson. Must try to book Kirk O’ Field for Inters Highland.
• E-mail EUSA. When are we supposed to freeze to death in early morning hours so that we can have rooms at the Pleasance to dance in?
• Pack. To go home on Saturday morning for all of four days.
• Claim. I spent £38.40 on train tickets to and from Aberdeen last week. It appears I can claim this back from Aberdeen University. All I need is for them to send me some forms. Which they’ve said they’ll do.
• The umpteen other things that I can’t remember right now.